Someone who is addicted to gambling will do it in whatever way they can. Physical or online casinos, the lottery, stock trading, or heck, even buying bottles of soda to win $10K.
And for every "problem" gambler there are 20 more who go to the casinos for fun. And many, many, many, many more who go there on vacation to say Las Vegas and gamble just that once.
Plus, it is a fundamental right to be able to do whatever with your money that doesn't harm anyone other than yourself.
Correlation is not causation. We could say the same thing about almost anything. Why have movie theaters? Because we all -know- that movie theaters attract teenagers with violent and sexy movies, and teenagers cause vandalism! Just look at the crime rates with towns that have teenagers and towns that don't!
You have to pay when your neighbor robs the local convenience store to pay the rent/mortgage/grocer (or their gambling debts, or just to gamble more),
One could say that about -anything- pleasurable. Yet I hope you are sane enough to realize that banning everything pleasurable is not the way to go.
loses the house/apartment anyway, and their spouse and child are now homeless and on welfare.
Yeah, because again, we know that -never- happens with anything else.
Or the person becomes homeless, with no health insurance, and ends up in the hospital.
Simple, they pay for their healthcare or take out a loan.
Or goes mentally insane and stabs you on the street corner for the $10 in your wallet.
Of course! Mental illness is caused by gambling! Along with everything else right? Lets just ban everything other than water and bread. But wait! Bread can cause obesity and water can cause drowning! Best ban that too!
Person A willingly decides to gamble online, they make online gambling illegal, Person A continues to gamble, Person A gets prosecuted at my expense. Who wins in this scenario? I certainly don't, neither does Person A.
Unless someone disturbs me, or endangers me, I shouldn't have to waste my money prosecuting them. Yeah, keep murders, thieves and other violent criminals out of the streets, but online gamblers? Why does it matter? They aren't affecting me.
Why is it that in 2010 we still try to create even more victimless crimes? Even if I'm against the object of the crime itself, I'm very much opposed to my tax dollars being wasted on people who want to do it.
I don't care if my neighbor plays poker. I do care if I have to pay money because my neighbor plays poker.
...Because we all know that the 1960s were just a happy time!
Lets see, Coalition forces dead in both Iraq and Afghanistan total 6,411 in 2010. 58,159 died in Vietnam. The US has been pretty stable in recent years with the exception of 9/11, compared to massive domestic instability, the assassination of a president, the time closest the world has come to total nuclear destruction, the cold war, etc.
Yeah, the 1960s were just a -great- time.
Yeah, we aren't going to great in 2010, but we, and the world, are a whole lot more stable now than we were when we landed a man on the moon.
So after 28 years, we don't have a replacement for the shuttle yet? In less than half the time, mankind went from sending metal orbs in orbit to landing a man on the moon. After 28 years in the US we can't even backport an older design and make a working manned spacecraft.
The Kindle has E-ink which is going to make for a better reading experience. Sure, its going to have a crappier web browsing experience, but ever try to really -read- anything on a LCD screen for a long period of time? It is terrible. While LCDs are fine for reading short amounts of text (a few pages), reading a book is painful on them.
LCD screens are superior in most aspects except for when reading lots and lots of text in which case the LCD screens are going to make your eyes cry out in pain while E-ink is just about the same as paper. The Kindle has its place, it isn't meant to be an iPad, tablet, laptop, toaster, etc. it is meant to let you read books without much eye strain which it does very well.
Ever spend some time in a company? Generally the people who are paid the most do the least amount of work. It is generally the people with a bit of college doing the bulk of the work while the people with the highest forms of education are sitting at their desks doing nothing.
My advice is go for cheap and easy classes that count for your degree, especially if the classes are useless for your job (as most will be) try taking them at a community college, or see if a "degree mill" offers the course for cheap that will transfer. Many universities will take community college or other sub-par classes if they are for general education or basic requirements. Now, if you are, say, a biology major, taking all your biology classes through a community college might not transfer, but taking math classes should.
If you haven't needed a degree or calculus in 20 years, why bother now?
In case you haven't realised it, there is a recession going on, a -lot- of people are either unemployed, their spouse is unemployed or they need a way to secure their job. Rather than doing the rational thing of looking at productivity, most businesses hire and pay based on education. If his wife lost her job and he was expecting the income, the only way he can get a raise to keep up his standard of living might be through a degree.
Most degrees are completely useless when done for a raise, but, money is money.
Corporations use a lot of services without paying for them. Your proposal would result in corporations paying higher taxes than they are today. To me that sounds good.
...Because we all know that because they are a corporation they don't have a trash bill, electric bill, water bill or a sewer bill!
My point is not to increase taxes for anyone (Rather, reduce them if possible) but rather to allow for free, rational taxation that allows the government to be both fiscally sound (people are paying for what they are using, no loans are needed) and still allow them to do functions that private businesses can do.
But it still would. The people who would drive the cars to provide business would still have to pay the fee for driving on the roads. They would pass it on in a small increase of shipping fees. If we applied the taxes equally, it is equal for everyone because they are paying for the fees themselves when they use the service. If they don't want to pay the fee, walk everywhere* and don't use shipping for goods. But in the end, it wouldn't amount to much of an increase for people. Think about it this way, a UPS truck must pay, say $500 a year to be licensed to drive on government funded roads, if he delivered 500 packages a -year- that would only amount to $1 extra per package, since 500 packages is -very- low for a year, it would be even lower to perhaps only a few cents or less.
*Yes, walking does create wear-and-tear on the sidewalks, but such wear is minimal and businesses located along the sidewalk would pay to have them built as it would benefit their customers.
The only reason those fine 2000 acres of land you have aren't taken over within weeks is because the whole damn government is there to threaten anyone who would try.
Then why doesn't all of civilisation collapse? It is because humans generally follow the law. If that was not the case there would be chaos in the streets, stores would be robbed bare, police officers would shoot people for the fun of it, etc.
But that doesn't happen. People who violate other's rights are rarities. If that were not the case we would not have order. Considering we are both typing this (presumably) from our own homes, without someone constantly trying to break in and shoot us both, I think we can both agree we have order.
It also allows the government to tax the lower-income people less than the higher earners, providing better schools for the lower earners, and over time giving the higher earners more qualified workers to hire, which overall promotes better wages and a higher standard of living.
Such things though, never improve the level of living. Especially not with public education, let me explain.
Society has, is and will always be on a pyramidal level, at the bottom you have basic workers, in the middle you have skilled workers, at the top you have managers. We will always need more basic workers than skilled workers and more skilled workers than managers. Society has, is and will always fall into this order. However, the definitions of skilled workers, basic workers and managers have changed throughout the ages.
Public education was designed to allow people who are good at one thing to be skilled in that one thing and therefore do their role (basic, skilled or manager) in the best way possible. It was meant to also put people in one of those three categories based on their skills. For example, if your father was a shepherd, you didn't have to be a shepherd if you were say, skilled at writing you could be a writer and learn the skills needed. However, all that changed recently. Rather than putting people in their proper roles, we have tried to upset the pyramid. We try to make -everyone- a skilled worker or a manager when they only have basic worker talents. Because as humanity as a whole has not improved, we still have people who lack the ability to gain skills "learning" skills. Why "learning"? Because we have made school (especially high school) so easy that it doesn't matter.
This means, unlike 100 years ago, you can't get a job with just a high school diploma because -everyone- has a high school diploma. It is no longer a certificate of skills. So instead now people have to go to college to "stand out" which of course means that college in 25 years is going to be even easier forcing people to get master degrees and above to "stand out".
This means the rich who can afford college will be better off than the poor who can't no matter what their skills really are. And I don't expect scholarships are going to help much in a few years when tuition rises much faster than inflation.
Wages also make no difference. Again, society will work on a pyramidal scale, we will always have poor people, even if they become poor due to their own actions (as the majority of the super-poor are today) or due to simply unfortunate circumstances.
Even if everyone in the US was super rich and having the standard of living as Bill Gates does now, either A) that would be the new "normal" and people as rich as Bill Gates would have an even higher standard of living or B) Most of the rest of the world would have a -terrible- standard of living.
Everything in society works at a pyramidal level. Because no one wants to be a "basic" worker in the US, we import them from Mexico.
It's also too bad that the people who use roads don't do so directly. By living in our country, where you get deliveries of pizza, packages of books and people coming out to service your heater so you don't free to death, you qualify to pay the road tax, whether you directly use a car or not.
...Or they can and pass it on to customers. It is a lot more fair. For example, if Pizza Hut has 20 cars they use to deliver pizza, they pay for 20 car's worth of wear on the roads and raise their price of delivery so it evens out. Same with the rest. UPS and FedEx can simply add on a bit more to shipping. In the end it evens out and becomes more fair.
People like you need to get over this idea that we're not in it together, because we are, despite what your belief tells you about "true independence". The idea of the United States isn't to be completely independent of one another. The
No, because such things aren't actively challenged. When you own a piece of land, people generally don't claim it to be theirs except in odd circumstances, in which case the losing party would pay the costs.
If everyone claimed that someone else's land was theirs, you might have a point. But we, as civilisation, tend to realise that a fence means that someone (not you) owns the property.
People should only pay for the government they use. VAT is unfair in that respect. What did the government do to deserve 20% of what I buy? Income taxes also make no sense. What we need is a tax that people pay when they use government services. Received $3,000 worth in welfare? Once you get a steady job you are taxed until you can pay back that $3K you "borrowed" from the government. Drive on government roads? Pay a fee when you get your first care licensed*. Add in a town tax for fire/police.
Governments should follow the same basic economic rules like businesses do, if I don't have an Xbox does it make sense for me to pay for Xbox live which I will never use? No, of course not. Yet that is effectively what VAT and income taxes do.
*One person isn't going to drive multiple cars at the same time, so it makes little sense to tax someone more if they own 3 cars compared to 1 because the wear on the road is going to be about the same
That makes no sense though. For example, farmers use a lot of land, yet their services are -very- valuable to humanity and on a whole they don't make too much money. It honestly takes no more power to protect and defend 1 acre of land as it does 4,000. The government should only be concerned with fraud and force.
People should be taxed in proportion to how much government they need. In general, people who own a lot of land are pretty self sufficient and don't need governmental assistance. Considering that the US is basically free from invasion and other threats, it makes no sense to tax people based on land, it simply doesn't add up. Someone living in an apartment owns no land, yet could very well be a huge drain on the government with welfare and other programs, yet they are paying nothing.
Plus, there is -lots- of land available. Don't believe me? Take a drive through the Dakotas and Wyoming. While land may be at a premium in Europe or large cities, on a large scale, land is insanely abundant.
In short, people should pay for the government they use, as a whole, people who own more land use less government in the 21st century. When Henry George used his theory, you must remember the US government was handing out land left and right to railroad companies and getting other perks from the government. Georgism was a natural idea back then, more land meant you took more from the government. Today, that isn't the case.
No. Taxes should -only- be used to pay for government services someone (or something) uses and should be paid as such. Many taxes do not make sense. For example, property taxes. It takes the US government no more manpower (in this day and age) to protect someone with 1,000 acres as it does the hobo living on the street. In fact, one could say the hobo has more drain on government funds than the rich landowner who rarely uses government services. But why is it that the rich landowner is taxed more?
I say, tax for what people use. The government should be a service provider. Nothing more. Drive on roads? Pay for the roads. Don't drive? Don't pay. Simple as that.
Corporations as a whole should be taxed based on what they use. If their business required a new road to be put in, have them pay for that road. If the store needs extra police protection have them pay for that.
No the end results are not the same. Quite honestly being homosexual, or being a pedophile in the most pure sense (someone who likes underage kids) is just the same as a man preferring say, latina women or asian women. If someone likes beautiful women that doesn't mean that he will sleep with them, same thing with homosexuality and pedophilia. Just because someone is sexually attracted to something doesn't mean that they will actually have sex with them. Otherwise, we'd all have supermodel wives.
Look, computers can not, and will not molest anyone. Heck, you can't even violate someone using -only- a computer. You can't commit rape over a computer or molest someone over a computer.
Part of having a free society is once you have paid your debt via restitution you should be free.
If he was really that much of a danger to society he should be in jail. But seeing as he didn't actually -do- anything, I don't see the point of him being in jail.
Ok, give me a few million dollars, all of the technology already developed and I will. It is hard to -start- a cell phone company because the initial costs are high (similar to an ISP), but once you get going, towers and the like are cheap when compared to when you are first starting.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who is addicted to gambling will do it in whatever way they can. Physical or online casinos, the lottery, stock trading, or heck, even buying bottles of soda to win $10K.
And for every "problem" gambler there are 20 more who go to the casinos for fun. And many, many, many, many more who go there on vacation to say Las Vegas and gamble just that once.
Plus, it is a fundamental right to be able to do whatever with your money that doesn't harm anyone other than yourself.
You have to pay when your neighbor robs the local convenience store to pay the rent/mortgage/grocer (or their gambling debts, or just to gamble more),
One could say that about -anything- pleasurable. Yet I hope you are sane enough to realize that banning everything pleasurable is not the way to go.
loses the house/apartment anyway, and their spouse and child are now homeless and on welfare.
Yeah, because again, we know that -never- happens with anything else.
Or the person becomes homeless, with no health insurance, and ends up in the hospital.
Simple, they pay for their healthcare or take out a loan.
Or goes mentally insane and stabs you on the street corner for the $10 in your wallet.
Of course! Mental illness is caused by gambling! Along with everything else right? Lets just ban everything other than water and bread. But wait! Bread can cause obesity and water can cause drowning! Best ban that too!
Lets see here.
Person A willingly decides to gamble online, they make online gambling illegal, Person A continues to gamble, Person A gets prosecuted at my expense. Who wins in this scenario? I certainly don't, neither does Person A.
Unless someone disturbs me, or endangers me, I shouldn't have to waste my money prosecuting them. Yeah, keep murders, thieves and other violent criminals out of the streets, but online gamblers? Why does it matter? They aren't affecting me.
Not sure about Massachusetts, but in a lot of states thankfully you don't have to waste your money paying taxes when dealing with online services.
Why is it that in 2010 we still try to create even more victimless crimes? Even if I'm against the object of the crime itself, I'm very much opposed to my tax dollars being wasted on people who want to do it.
I don't care if my neighbor plays poker. I do care if I have to pay money because my neighbor plays poker.
...Because we all know that the 1960s were just a happy time!
Lets see, Coalition forces dead in both Iraq and Afghanistan total 6,411 in 2010. 58,159 died in Vietnam. The US has been pretty stable in recent years with the exception of 9/11, compared to massive domestic instability, the assassination of a president, the time closest the world has come to total nuclear destruction, the cold war, etc.
Yeah, the 1960s were just a -great- time.
Yeah, we aren't going to great in 2010, but we, and the world, are a whole lot more stable now than we were when we landed a man on the moon.
So after 28 years, we don't have a replacement for the shuttle yet? In less than half the time, mankind went from sending metal orbs in orbit to landing a man on the moon. After 28 years in the US we can't even backport an older design and make a working manned spacecraft.
Does the BBC count? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8603938.stm
The Kindle has E-ink which is going to make for a better reading experience. Sure, its going to have a crappier web browsing experience, but ever try to really -read- anything on a LCD screen for a long period of time? It is terrible. While LCDs are fine for reading short amounts of text (a few pages), reading a book is painful on them.
LCD screens are superior in most aspects except for when reading lots and lots of text in which case the LCD screens are going to make your eyes cry out in pain while E-ink is just about the same as paper. The Kindle has its place, it isn't meant to be an iPad, tablet, laptop, toaster, etc. it is meant to let you read books without much eye strain which it does very well.
So what is this going to be? You pay Apple $5 to have your site listed, if it is "objectionable" or competes with Apple's own sites you get rejected?
Ever spend some time in a company? Generally the people who are paid the most do the least amount of work. It is generally the people with a bit of college doing the bulk of the work while the people with the highest forms of education are sitting at their desks doing nothing.
My advice is go for cheap and easy classes that count for your degree, especially if the classes are useless for your job (as most will be) try taking them at a community college, or see if a "degree mill" offers the course for cheap that will transfer. Many universities will take community college or other sub-par classes if they are for general education or basic requirements. Now, if you are, say, a biology major, taking all your biology classes through a community college might not transfer, but taking math classes should.
If you haven't needed a degree or calculus in 20 years, why bother now?
In case you haven't realised it, there is a recession going on, a -lot- of people are either unemployed, their spouse is unemployed or they need a way to secure their job. Rather than doing the rational thing of looking at productivity, most businesses hire and pay based on education. If his wife lost her job and he was expecting the income, the only way he can get a raise to keep up his standard of living might be through a degree.
Most degrees are completely useless when done for a raise, but, money is money.
Corporations use a lot of services without paying for them. Your proposal would result in corporations paying higher taxes than they are today. To me that sounds good.
My point is not to increase taxes for anyone (Rather, reduce them if possible) but rather to allow for free, rational taxation that allows the government to be both fiscally sound (people are paying for what they are using, no loans are needed) and still allow them to do functions that private businesses can do.
But it still would. The people who would drive the cars to provide business would still have to pay the fee for driving on the roads. They would pass it on in a small increase of shipping fees. If we applied the taxes equally, it is equal for everyone because they are paying for the fees themselves when they use the service. If they don't want to pay the fee, walk everywhere* and don't use shipping for goods. But in the end, it wouldn't amount to much of an increase for people. Think about it this way, a UPS truck must pay, say $500 a year to be licensed to drive on government funded roads, if he delivered 500 packages a -year- that would only amount to $1 extra per package, since 500 packages is -very- low for a year, it would be even lower to perhaps only a few cents or less.
*Yes, walking does create wear-and-tear on the sidewalks, but such wear is minimal and businesses located along the sidewalk would pay to have them built as it would benefit their customers.
The only reason those fine 2000 acres of land you have aren't taken over within weeks is because the whole damn government is there to threaten anyone who would try.
Then why doesn't all of civilisation collapse? It is because humans generally follow the law. If that was not the case there would be chaos in the streets, stores would be robbed bare, police officers would shoot people for the fun of it, etc.
But that doesn't happen. People who violate other's rights are rarities. If that were not the case we would not have order. Considering we are both typing this (presumably) from our own homes, without someone constantly trying to break in and shoot us both, I think we can both agree we have order.
It also allows the government to tax the lower-income people less than the higher earners, providing better schools for the lower earners, and over time giving the higher earners more qualified workers to hire, which overall promotes better wages and a higher standard of living.
Such things though, never improve the level of living. Especially not with public education, let me explain.
Society has, is and will always be on a pyramidal level, at the bottom you have basic workers, in the middle you have skilled workers, at the top you have managers. We will always need more basic workers than skilled workers and more skilled workers than managers. Society has, is and will always fall into this order. However, the definitions of skilled workers, basic workers and managers have changed throughout the ages.
Public education was designed to allow people who are good at one thing to be skilled in that one thing and therefore do their role (basic, skilled or manager) in the best way possible. It was meant to also put people in one of those three categories based on their skills. For example, if your father was a shepherd, you didn't have to be a shepherd if you were say, skilled at writing you could be a writer and learn the skills needed. However, all that changed recently. Rather than putting people in their proper roles, we have tried to upset the pyramid. We try to make -everyone- a skilled worker or a manager when they only have basic worker talents. Because as humanity as a whole has not improved, we still have people who lack the ability to gain skills "learning" skills. Why "learning"? Because we have made school (especially high school) so easy that it doesn't matter.
This means, unlike 100 years ago, you can't get a job with just a high school diploma because -everyone- has a high school diploma. It is no longer a certificate of skills. So instead now people have to go to college to "stand out" which of course means that college in 25 years is going to be even easier forcing people to get master degrees and above to "stand out".
This means the rich who can afford college will be better off than the poor who can't no matter what their skills really are. And I don't expect scholarships are going to help much in a few years when tuition rises much faster than inflation.
Wages also make no difference. Again, society will work on a pyramidal scale, we will always have poor people, even if they become poor due to their own actions (as the majority of the super-poor are today) or due to simply unfortunate circumstances.
Even if everyone in the US was super rich and having the standard of living as Bill Gates does now, either A) that would be the new "normal" and people as rich as Bill Gates would have an even higher standard of living or B) Most of the rest of the world would have a -terrible- standard of living.
Everything in society works at a pyramidal level. Because no one wants to be a "basic" worker in the US, we import them from Mexico.
It's also too bad that the people who use roads don't do so directly. By living in our country, where you get deliveries of pizza, packages of books and people coming out to service your heater so you don't free to death, you qualify to pay the road tax, whether you directly use a car or not.
People like you need to get over this idea that we're not in it together, because we are, despite what your belief tells you about "true independence". The idea of the United States isn't to be completely independent of one another. The
No, because such things aren't actively challenged. When you own a piece of land, people generally don't claim it to be theirs except in odd circumstances, in which case the losing party would pay the costs.
If everyone claimed that someone else's land was theirs, you might have a point. But we, as civilisation, tend to realise that a fence means that someone (not you) owns the property.
People should only pay for the government they use. VAT is unfair in that respect. What did the government do to deserve 20% of what I buy? Income taxes also make no sense. What we need is a tax that people pay when they use government services. Received $3,000 worth in welfare? Once you get a steady job you are taxed until you can pay back that $3K you "borrowed" from the government. Drive on government roads? Pay a fee when you get your first care licensed*. Add in a town tax for fire/police.
Governments should follow the same basic economic rules like businesses do, if I don't have an Xbox does it make sense for me to pay for Xbox live which I will never use? No, of course not. Yet that is effectively what VAT and income taxes do.
*One person isn't going to drive multiple cars at the same time, so it makes little sense to tax someone more if they own 3 cars compared to 1 because the wear on the road is going to be about the same
That makes no sense though. For example, farmers use a lot of land, yet their services are -very- valuable to humanity and on a whole they don't make too much money. It honestly takes no more power to protect and defend 1 acre of land as it does 4,000. The government should only be concerned with fraud and force.
People should be taxed in proportion to how much government they need. In general, people who own a lot of land are pretty self sufficient and don't need governmental assistance. Considering that the US is basically free from invasion and other threats, it makes no sense to tax people based on land, it simply doesn't add up. Someone living in an apartment owns no land, yet could very well be a huge drain on the government with welfare and other programs, yet they are paying nothing. Plus, there is -lots- of land available. Don't believe me? Take a drive through the Dakotas and Wyoming. While land may be at a premium in Europe or large cities, on a large scale, land is insanely abundant.
In short, people should pay for the government they use, as a whole, people who own more land use less government in the 21st century. When Henry George used his theory, you must remember the US government was handing out land left and right to railroad companies and getting other perks from the government. Georgism was a natural idea back then, more land meant you took more from the government. Today, that isn't the case.
No. Taxes should -only- be used to pay for government services someone (or something) uses and should be paid as such. Many taxes do not make sense. For example, property taxes. It takes the US government no more manpower (in this day and age) to protect someone with 1,000 acres as it does the hobo living on the street. In fact, one could say the hobo has more drain on government funds than the rich landowner who rarely uses government services. But why is it that the rich landowner is taxed more?
I say, tax for what people use. The government should be a service provider. Nothing more. Drive on roads? Pay for the roads. Don't drive? Don't pay. Simple as that.
Corporations as a whole should be taxed based on what they use. If their business required a new road to be put in, have them pay for that road. If the store needs extra police protection have them pay for that.
Anything else is unjust.
No the end results are not the same. Quite honestly being homosexual, or being a pedophile in the most pure sense (someone who likes underage kids) is just the same as a man preferring say, latina women or asian women. If someone likes beautiful women that doesn't mean that he will sleep with them, same thing with homosexuality and pedophilia. Just because someone is sexually attracted to something doesn't mean that they will actually have sex with them. Otherwise, we'd all have supermodel wives.
Look, computers can not, and will not molest anyone. Heck, you can't even violate someone using -only- a computer. You can't commit rape over a computer or molest someone over a computer.
Part of having a free society is once you have paid your debt via restitution you should be free.
If he was really that much of a danger to society he should be in jail. But seeing as he didn't actually -do- anything, I don't see the point of him being in jail.
Exactly. While Google wants to make money, a lot of their actions show that they want to simply make the web better, money or no money.
Ok, give me a few million dollars, all of the technology already developed and I will. It is hard to -start- a cell phone company because the initial costs are high (similar to an ISP), but once you get going, towers and the like are cheap when compared to when you are first starting.